Four Midterm Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

The historic rebuke of the Trump Presidency led me to discover some interesting things. Here are four of them.

1. Trump is horrible and deserves immediate impeachment and removal from office. Unfortunately, his Vice President is worse in some respects because he is more intelligent and better-organized. I would hope that any effort to remove Trump is paired with one to remove Vance first.

That said, Vice President John C. Calhoun once requested an impeachment inquiry of his own dealings from the House in order to clear his name of an allegation of profiting from a war contract.

Can you imagine anyone in this Administration doing that, either because they know they'd be cleared, or even because they actually care about their reputation among honest people?

2. While I am sure I don't agree with many of Scott Colom's political positions, I am glad he won the Senate seat in Mississippi.

He certainly had one of the best political ads I've ever seen, which I embed below.

Mississippi picked another Senator, instead.

3. Returning to impeachment and removal, I am glad to hear that physician and Senator-elect Annie Andrews (D-SC) has said that "I believe we need to impeach and remove RFK Jr."

Unfortunately, she is on the socialized medicine bandwagon, but getting rid of Kennedy would be a good first step towards addressing a serious health hazard millions of Americans now face in the person of that malevolent crackpot.

4. As I noted earlier in the week, Elon Musk's poor return on his huge political expenditures in Texas provides a welcome counterexample to the idea that "the rich" can "buy" elections.

-- CAV

A Good Job Hunt Debunking

Regulars will know that I love a good debunking, especially if it's of something that "everyone knows."

If you can't get the world to stop babbling nonsense to you, the next best thing is to have a solid understanding of why said nonsense is wrong, and, as a bonus, be confident in your ability to shoot down the worst offenders.

In the realm of job hunting, one of these eight glasses of water a day is Bust a hump trying to find and apply to jobs within an hour of their being posted.

This has always struck me as ridiculous and, although I have always ignored this "advice," it was fun hearing an experienced hiring manager explain what's wrong with it:

Most hiring managers look at applications either in batches or all at once at the end of the application period. They're not waiting breathlessly by their application portal looking at candidates as they come in over the first hour or two after a job is posted. (Hell, many hiring managers don't even know exactly when a job is posted, just that it will be "today" or "sometime this week").

Moreover, anyone who has been hiring for a while knows that, to the extent that you can find patterns, the very earliest applications are rarely the strongest matches because they're mostly people who are just applying to everything they see, and the strongest candidates tend to come later because they're being more selective. (This is just a general pattern; obviously there are exceptions.)

Plus, there's no way you can customize your application if you're racing to get it in within an hour of the job posting.

On top of the fun and reassurance of the above, Alison Green does address the parts of this advice that are true, namely that: (1) There are some jobs for which this is true, but they are generally the kinds of jobs most people don't want; and (2) It is advantageous to apply to a position you want soon after it is posted, but with soon meaning within a couple of weeks, not immediately.

-- CAV

Electoral College, RIP?

As I speculated here in May, yet another midterm casualty of Trump's corruption and lawlessness may turn out to be the Electoral College.

In that update on the progress of a leftist effort to work around the Electoral College, I noted:

As of now, that total [of electoral votes in state signatories to the "National Popular Vote" compact] is 222, and, as Vox points out, there is a real chance that this year's midterms, fueled by widespread discontent with Donald Trump and his congressional Republican lapdogs, could cause the balance to tip over the decisive 270 electoral votes required to make the compact binding.

At RealClear Politics, political scientist James Sieja indicates that the results of the midterms have set the stage for that to happen in any number of ways:

Until the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the NPVC was stuck at 222 Electoral College votes.

However, with Democrats gaining lawmaking authority – i.e., control of both houses of the state legislature and governorship – in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada, the NPVC has a clear shot of controlling the outcome of the 2028 election.

If the five newly Democrat-controlled states pass compact legislation, the NPVC will reach 283 Electoral College votes. Any one of Arizona, Wisconsin, or Nevada could not pass NPVC legislation, and the compact will still go into effect.

The Sieja piece, as well as my past posts on this endeavor bring up the downsides to the realization of this effort, which presumably would need to pass muster before the Supreme Court to take effect.

-- CAV

Midterms as Victory FOR Money in Politics

George Will cautions against "giddiness" in the wake of the midterms, concluding with a warning we should heed that the President is not well.

The whole thing is worth a read, but Will fleshes out a point I merely noted in passing yesterday: that Elon Musk's waste of hundreds of millions in Texas political spending is a a great counterexample to the idea that we should limit political spending by individuals. (We set aside for the moment the fact that such bans should be opposed as violations of individual rights.):

The importance of money in politics is more asserted and deplored than measured. In Texas, Elon Musk, the most overrated dabbler in U.S. politics, perhaps did something useful with his estimated $224 million money geyser for Republicans. He unintentionally demonstrated that there is a point at which the utility of political dollars not only declines steeply, but actually becomes negative. Senator-elect James Talarico prospered politically while saying, "Texas is not for sale."

Furthermore, all political spending funds, directly or indirectly, the dissemination of political speech. Those who have nothing intelligent, interesting, pertinent or plausible to say will injure themselves by lavish spending that makes this absence obvious. Vivek Ramaswamy will not be Ohio's governor (or a Republican presidential candidate again), in part because of a campaign ad (featuring his opponent's mother) that will live in political lore as a spectacular act of self-harm. [bold added]

Yes, again, just dumping money into political ads still depends on those ads persuading voters. But I had not considered the second case: If someone is a big enough ass, it can be a good thing that he is well able to get the word out before he comes to power.

The 2026 midterms way well have been a victory for freedom of speech, even if an accidental one.

-- CAV

Some Center-Left Sanity

As if to echo political scientists warning Democrats not to read too much into Trump's election-day wipeout, the Washington Post considers a couple of nasty themes that always come up when Democrats win nationally: taxing "the rich" and preventing "the rich" from spending their own money in elections.

(See also: "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business" by Ayn Rand, which, alas, continues to age like fine wine.)

The editorial's point of departure is California, where dueling ballot measures are polling in exactly the opposite way one might expect from the Republicans' drubbing last week:

And it still does not appear to have been enough to get California voters to approve a wealth tax. Proposition 40 is losing by about 10 points, with nearly two-thirds of the vote counted as of Friday. Proposition 42, a competing ballot measure that would prohibit new state wealth taxes and retroactive taxes, is on track to pass.

That is excellent news, and the piece analyzes both how hard it would be to make this folly federal law, as well as how bad it would be for American innovation.

But that's not all! as the infomercials always say. The piece also notes that the last Tuesday has provided an undeniable counterexample to the notion that "the rich" can buy elections, and so must therefore be prevented from spending their own money in the exercise of their inalienable right to freedom of speech:

When voters started to understand these realities, and the polling turned against the measure, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) cried foul, criticizing billionaires' spending for tainting the results. Did he really expect them to do nothing while he bragged about taking 5 percent of everything they own?

It isn't as though spending determines election results, as Tuesday's elections elsewhere proved. Elon Musk, the world's richest man on paper, spent more than anyone ever has in a single election cycle, backing Republicans who got slaughtered. If California voters were bothered by billionaires' activism, they could have told them to take a hike, just like Texas voters did to Musk.

Hats off to the editorial board of the Washington Post. While I wouldn't bet on Democrats heeding their wise words, it is good to hear them coming from somewhere.

An argument I saw, but can't place, noted that many of the new Democrats in Congress are moderates, meaning that the Dem-Socialists won't enjoy their recent outsized power as crucial members of a very thin majority. I wouldn't put the odds of a sane Democrat majority as very high, but perhaps they are nonzero.

That's certainly better than zero, particularly since it remains possible that the brain-dead ignoramuses of MAGA could continue controlling the GOP, despite this obvious-but-to them repudiation.

-- CAV

Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. Alex Tabarrok shows off his "sky roomba" robotic window cleaner and makes a good economics point while he's at it.

I'm going to look into getting one of these...

2. A role-playing enthusiast, upon reading phrases like apply your full hp to the task in a text from a century ago knows that the abbreviation doesn't stand for hit points -- and makes the neat/amusing connection that:

a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I, being older, might have realized the author meant horsepower, but I had never heard it used colloquially in such a way.

3. The same blogger also considers an [a]lternate timeline in which all Greek and Latin roots are swapped. I like the alterate term for television.

4. An attorney explains the origin of the annoying practice of following written numbers with Arabic numerals in parentheses.

In "Five (5) Reasons to Stop Writing Numbers Like This," Andrew Schrack notes that:

The convention originated with handwritten documents, in which it was easy for numbers to be confused. (I've personally had my scribbled "9" mistaken for a "7"). Numbers also could be altered easily by inserting extra numerals or attempting to transform a 3 into an 8. In fact, the easy alteration of numerals is the reason that we spell out the numbers on our checks (for those of us who still use checks). Still, numerals are easier to read at a glance, and so early legal writers included both.

Schrack is correct that the practice is not just obsolete, but can create problems, such as less-legible documents and ambiguity.

(And now I know, and don't have to be content with merely laughing at the practice.)

-- CAV

A Decent Post-Election Roundup

I'd planned to take my usual Thursday off from politics, but changed my mind after stopping by electoral-vote.com, which presents its first updates after the election on its blog.

Keeping in mind that the site is center-left, you mileage will vary from the comprehensive news roundup, through the humorous look at Republican reaction (Don Bacon (R-Blue Dot) was a funny touch.), to a post possibly exemplifying the very hubris the roundup warned against (Nationalize SpaceX and deport Musk? Voters just rejected Trump's agenda. I can't tell whether this is a joke in today's era of Poe's Law applying to both "sides" of the political spectrum.)

I'll leave you with samples from the news roundup post, which includes warnings against more of the same from Republicans:

It turns out that cults have a shelf life and when the cultist-in-chief falls, he takes the whole cult down with him. Republicans are about to learn this the hard way. In 2028, they can offer more of the same, but the voters don't want more of the same. But that is all the Republicans have. Going back to a kinder, gentler George H.W. Bush party would be quite a trick. That isn't what the Republican Party stands for anymore. Does it stand for anything? In 2020, the Republican Party didn't even bother writing a platform. It just said: "Whatever Donald Trump wants, that's what we want." That's not a political party. That's a cult of personality. Does the institutional Republican Party actually stand for anything? ...

... and against Democrat hubris:

Democrats read the wrong message into the midterms at their peril. They didn't win. The other guys lost. There is a huge difference. People don't like the Democrats. Millions of people see them as weak and woke and think they can't even tell the difference between a boy and a girl. They got more senators, representatives, governors, and state legislators because the voters thought the other guys were corrupt and raised the price of gas. That is not a winning formula for 2028...

The section about dummymandering is interesting, and shows that Trump's gerrymandering did indeed backfire in Texas.

-- CAV